Podcast Title: Inside the NBA Bubble: LeBron’s Reign in Lakers’ Championship

In this episode of “A King’s Reign,” we share memories of an experience covering the NBA unlike any other: the NBA’s 2019-20 season restart — or as it is commonly referred to: “The Bubble.”

From quarantine videos to LeBron James’ influence to the near abandonment of the restart to the Lakers’ title and where it ranks among championships, we discuss the unique living and working conditions — a “three-month science project” — for players, coaches and media at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

These are excerpts from our conversation in Episode 8 of “A King’s Reign”: The Bubble Title. Find the series on The Athletic app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and grammar.

---

The unique experience of ‘The Bubble’

Vardon: The context of this, of course, is that there was a bubble. And at the end of it, LeBron and the Lakers won the NBA championship. It was LeBron’s fourth title. He became the first player ever to lead three different teams to an NBA championship. We have never seen any circumstances like that before or since. But this episode isn’t just about that. It isn’t just about the Lakers beating the Heat on the floor because this, as I’ve said, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which is saying something for you or me or these NBA guys who have done and seen so much.

When I say “bubble” or when someone says “bubble” to you, and you know you were there, what are the first things that come to mind?

Amick: To be honest, at the risk of going down a darker road, I think briefly, we can contextualize it this way: This was a tough time for the world, right? All of us were trying to get through that challenge. All of us were trying to figure out what COVID was. Most of us were impacted in terms of loved ones. You had these real life challenges staring you in the face. Then, inevitably, because the world is a capitalist place, you then had the idea that, OK, the NBA is one of those entities that is now going to try to figure out how does life go on. How do they open up revenue streams again in the interest of not losing that season?

As you kind of highlighted, they come up with this plan: 22 teams, 13 from the West, nine from the East. That differentiation was based on essentially the idea of who was closest to playoff position at that time in the standings. If you were within six games, then you got the invite of the playoff position. If you weren’t, you did not. And it was kind of “away we go.”

But it was a grand experiment that was hatched by everybody from Commissioner Adam Silver to Disney CEO Bob Iger. Chris Paul, at the time was the head of the players union, and a lot of stories have been written about the way that those three guys were principal in getting this plan in place.

You and I, we had this kind of one-two-punch experience in the bubble. You covered the first six weeks-ish. We spent a little time in there together. And then, I was on the back end. But, my god, in my entire career covering basketball for a long time, I don’t think I’ll ever have a more unique experience.

So we can start from the top. But you were there first, so take us behind the curtain a little bit. How was the opening stretch for you?

Vardon: Looking back on it, I always look at it fondly. And I know when it was happening in the moment, in the present tense, I recognized the weirdness of it and the difficulty of the schedule of living and of all the precautions we had to take for COVID of the week in total quarantine inside your room.

And, of course, there’s being away from your house and your family for however long. I think my actual tenure in the bubble was 60 days, and LeBron basically threatening to go home was part of why my stay was extended a little bit longer. But those are at least some of the downsides.

But the plus side was, at that time in the world, everybody was locked inside their house. It was summertime. So you could you felt kind of safe going outside, maybe. But you were in no way really re-engaging with the world yet.

And so I found that for us … once you got out of quarantine in the bubble, you were able to be around people that you call friends, every day. And you got to go to work, like actually go and interact with people and even give them fist bumps and pats on the back. And so, the human interaction that way (such as) getting to drink some wine together at night … every single night that we were there. (Laughs.)

When the first wave went through, the quarantine (was) you arrive at Disney at the resort (where) we were all staying, Coronado Springs. And they escort you to your room, and you’re wearing a mask. Of course, everybody’s wearing masks. They escort you in there. Then once you’re in the room, that’s it. That’s it. You’re not going anywhere until you test negative for the next seven days.

Producer Mike (Smeltz) actually created a montage of the videos that I had produced for The Athletic and our Twitter and social media sites of what it was like every day in quarantine and then as time wore on in the bubble.

🏀 Welcome to The Bubble Diaries 🏀

☑️ 7 days of quarantine
☑️ @ouraring
☑️ Social distancing alarm

Go inside the #NBABubble with @joevardon! pic.twitter.com/sCX8Gxn76B

— The Athletic NBA (@TheAthleticNBA) July 13, 2020

---

Players’ protest, LeBron’s reaction and the result

Amick: Man, what a time. I feel like it’s probably fitting to fast forward a little bit because LeBron and the rest of the league tries to find their way during the late-regular season within the bubble.

Just to give the tick-tock on the Lakers timeline. You know that the entire league shuts down in mid-March; they last play on March 10 (and the) Lakers lose a game to Brooklyn. They (start play) on July 30 inside the bubble. And then from there, they’re on their way. By the time I get there — and I would love to hear your reflections on this because it was a historical moment within the NBA — I am in quarantine.

Like you alluded to, the bubble has already changed in the time that you’ve been there to when I got there. Certain luxuries that were not afforded to the group on the first half were afforded to the group on the second half.

But first I had to get out of quarantine. So I think it was Day 5 of quarantine for me, where the entire bubble comes to a standstill because of the shooting of Jacob Blake by law enforcement in Kenosha, Wis.

And the historic players meeting that happened after that. Now, I’ll tell you, Joe, that as you know, a reporter’s worst nightmare is to be on the grounds of something historic, something compelling, something incredibly interesting, but to be locked inside of a room. And that is what I was faced with when it was Day 5 of quarantine, and it was driving me absolutely crazy. I was already sick and tired of being within those closed walls and you know, these are first-world problems, but at the time, I’m upset because the windows in the hotels didn’t actually open so you get no fresh air. I’m getting as restless as restless can be.

On the outside, the players, all of them with some coaches involved, are meeting at a nearby conference room to discuss whether or not this season is going to continue. You had very serious social issues happening. You had the shooting of this young man seemingly unjustly at the time and a lot of anger and a lot of angst in that room and a lot of uncertainty about what they should do.

Vardon: We had a bubble. Everybody was in quarantine. Everybody had to go through it. You get out of it, practice starts and there’s this novelty of basketball being back and people being on the court and us getting a chance to go back to work like I was talking about earlier. And everybody’s happy about that.

But as the days wore on and the scenery didn’t change inside the bubble and the routine stayed the same, you’re getting tested, you’re eating a certain kind of food. There started to be a little bit of a strain. The mental side of that started to take a toll. Then at the same time we were already in this — like you had mentioned — sort of a cauldron as a country with social justice and issues of violence against unarmed African-Americans.

It happened a number of times. You know, of course, George Floyd had died that summer, and there was even a movement, because of these things, to not have a bubble. That’s actually kind of a LeBron entry point is Kyrie Irving and a couple other guys were pushing to not have a bubble. There was some mild discussion about it among the players union. But finally everybody was kind of looking toward LeBron, and (Pat Beverley) said it best. It’s one of my all-time favorite quotes. He said, look, if LeBron’s hooping, we’re all hooping. And LeBron wanted to play in the bubble.

Hoopers say what y’all want. If @KingJames said he hooping. We all hooping. Not Personal only BUSINESS🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾 🙏🏾 #StayWoke ✊🏿✊🏿✊🏿

— Patrick Beverley (@patbev21) June 14, 2020

So everything moved on as planned. But as as things started to wear on and the temperature was rising on a couple of things, then we have the shooting that you mentioned of Jacob Blake in (Kenosha).

I was supposed to stay through the first round and Sam was supposed to pick us up from the second round through the finals.

So the series is Milwaukee (and) it’s Orlando (before Game 5 of their first-round series). I go into the arena, I put my stuff down and I look at the scoreboard and there is like 16 minutes left and the Magic are on the floor — 16 minutes until the supposed opening tip. There’s no Milwaukee. And I found that to be strange.

I’ll never forget Malika Andrews of ESPN and I, we had our stuff down at the same table. Both knew something was wrong. I walked by the Magic locker room. Some of their guys were still on the floor, but there was a strange look on some of the Orlando Magic personnel faces. Then I walked by Bucks PR … the Bucks aren’t coming out. Within 10 to 20 minutes, every reporter who was not in quarantine — the first wave of us — everybody was stationed outside this locker room.

The Bucks were stuck in there. They couldn’t leave. What was crazy was the bathroom was outside of the locker room. So to pee, they actually had to go by us. After about an hour and a half, that started to happen. Like, there’s all this drama. Like, there (are) questions of what’s going to happen. Is the basketball season over? Is the experiment over? We can hear them through the wall talking amongst each other. We can hear, like, a public official. It turned out to be the lieutenant governor of the state of Wisconsin on speakerphone. We can hear all this stuff, and it’s really tense. And then in the meantime, here comes Kyle Korver (and) here comes George Hill out to take a pee.

Amick: Did they just walk by awkwardly and try not to engage with anybody?

Vardon: You know the job. It requires you to shout a question. And when they were going to pee, it was a little bit more relaxed, like, “Listen, these guys are just going to the bathroom, leave them alone.” Fine.

But I don’t remember how long we were out there, but I think it was three-plus hours. They finally said the game had been called off. The Bucks had (holed) up long after the game had been canceled. They had, as you had mentioned, they had this meeting set in the ballroom, but they wanted to make a statement first. So the whole team comes out and they read a statement and they say no questions. And, of course, you have to shout something. So, I shouted a question about “Are you considering canceling the season?” — that kind of thing.

It turned into an eight-hour ordeal stuck outside the Bucks locker room in the arena.

Amick: Incredible. Incredible. Then from there, I would say, how did they get to the boardroom? I think it’s late that night and, correct me if I’m wrong, my recollection is that you had the Bucks driving this ship. You had George Hill in particular, having a lot to do and probably being the most prominent voice with the choice not to play. Those were kind of the later accounts.

But as we kind of have a “six degrees of LeBron” aspect to this conversation, one thing that I thought we were reminded of in that situation is that LeBron is and has been for a long time, the No. 1 player in the NBA when it comes to influence. And it’s not necessarily the GOAT discussion or résumé discussion. We’re just talking about juice and clout and voice and presence. And LeBron has been No. 1.

So when it was not LeBron making the choice to not play a game, it felt almost as if there was a sense of like, “What does LeBron think?” And how are we going to now reconcile what the Bucks chose to do with what LeBron, et al. want to do in this bubble? And that, I think, was a huge part of the discussion in the meeting.

Vardon: Yes, it was. That was basically the main thing. And we said that if LeBron’s hoopin’, we’re all hoopin’.

Well, when they went into that meeting, LeBron was furious and he was upset with the Milwaukee Bucks. He was upset because, at least his stated reason, was that the Bucks did this almost on a whim. There had been talk throughout the previous couple of days about maybe the Raptors were thinking about doing something like some sort of protest. There were a couple of teams — that the Celtics were one.

I think there were a couple of teams that were talking about this … but nobody did it. There was no protest.

So (when the Bucks did it) there was no coordination with the Players Association. There was nothing. The league had no heads up. And certainly, like other players, didn’t know that the Bucks were going to do this. They decided basically in the locker room moments before the game — because they were there, they had gone through their warm-up, Giannis had done his warm-up that day — they decided not to play.

LeBron was furious about this because he said that this decision was made on a whim and that there was no planning. When you do something like this and you actually disrupt a game in a season, and particularly this one, the way they did that they had, you don’t just show up again. You don’t just walk back out there and play like all the games had been canceled.

LeBron was like, there is no plan to just start back and play. And there is nothing; what can be gained by what you did? And people didn’t have an answer for that. So he was ready to go home and he voted along with the majority, the Lakers and I believe the Clippers, to actually (say) that’s it, that they were going to go home and cancel the season. They were the only two teams to do that, but all it takes is one. The playoffs had begun. I mean, I guess you could have said, “Well, the Lakers forfeit their playoff series,” I guess, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. These two teams … had voted to go home. But the vote or sort of any action was tabled.

Overnight, Chris Paul, and I think some other powers that be, got LeBron on the phone with Barack Obama. And the former president, who knows LeBron well, basically was like, no, LeBron, like you actually have an opportunity here because of this protest to get something that you want from the owners.

The other thing that we haven’t really mentioned yet, Sam, (is that) this all plays into what was happening at the time (as) the players were taking a knee before the national anthem and they were wearing T-shirts as warm-up shirts before every game that said Black Lives Matter.

Postgame they were either being asked about it, and if they weren’t, they were demanding to talk about some social justice issues. I believe Breonna Taylor was one of them where they kept saying justice for her. They were doing this, and they felt like their reach was only getting so far.

What the former president says was, you have an opportunity, the owners are listening to you in a way that they probably never have before. You can get them to do some things.

And so, they came back the next day, there was a meeting between the league office and who, of course, represents the owners, and some of these players and these demands were brought up. One of the main ones was the creation of a social justice coalition, which basically is the owners pay for it, pay to lobby for things that the players want politically, whether it’s in Congress or the White House or at the state level. And so that was a major concession that LeBron and Chris Paul and others — because LeBron was threatening to go home, LeBron was able to squeeze out of this. And that was one of the … conditions of returning to play.

Where does the bubble title rank?

Vardon: As we’ve been talking, it popped into my head that it’s this totally once-in-a-history-of-the-world-type thing that happens and we’re talking about all these experiences that we’ve had and everything that we saw and witnessed. Of course, the champion in a bubble environment was the LeBron James team. Like, of course, that happened. Something so unique and so different that the champion ended up being him and his team.

We’ve got this player (who) is so transcendent that he is worth an 11-day podcast series in which we won’t even get to all the things that you could get to talking about him. And one of them is that he happens to win a title in the bubble, and this is something people talk about, like how do you value or rate or rank the bubble title as compared to other titles?

Amick: I love the question. I’m glad you took it there. I am 100 percent firmly entrenched in the camp that says this title is worth as much (as), if not more than, any other title. And I don’t really — and this is going to sound kind of arrogant — I don’t really care what anybody thinks who wasn’t in the bubble, you know what I mean? Because the one thing LeBron and I have in common, if nothing else, is I know what it was like to wake up in the morning and be concerned about whether or not — I mean, I’m not exaggerating — whether or not if I jump on a bicycle and I take a left turn when I was supposed to take a right, I cross a certain line and I get seen by a member of security, if I’m now under quarantine for another seven days, because that happened to an NBA staffer.

Richaun Holmes tried to get Uber Eats and, you know, walked a little too far, got back in quarantine. We know the Lou Williams story when he got excused to go to a funeral, but then, you know, made his way to Magic City. There was a bunch of stories like that.

I told this story earlier, Joe, I mean, I legitimately — again, all’s well that ends well — but I got fairly close to getting booted out of the bubble because of our quarantine breach during that time. I only highlight that to say that was the unique challenge of just living in the bubble.

Then from a basketball standpoint, here’s all I care about: Giannis Antetokounmpo has since talked about this openly; he gave serious consideration to heading for the exits and leaving the bubble. From a mental health standpoint, it put a strain on everybody who was there, and LeBron kind of cut through all that, even with the concerns he had about the way things were handled in the shutdown. They navigated those waters. When he got on that court, he was incredibly locked in.

And listen, Anthony Davis, give him his flowers. He was locked in as well. He played arguably the best basketball of his career during that championship stretch. I don’t think that’s because there were no fans or because they could focus.

No, I think the focus was harder to come by. Now the travel, sure, nobody traveled. Their bodies were fresher. That was an advantage. But guess what? It was an advantage for everybody. Did it help a guy who was in his mid-30s at the time? No question. But you saw so many high-level star players. I don’t know how else to put it other than wilt under that pressure.

The Clippers come to mind, like, my god, watching Paul George shoot that infamous 3 off the side of the backboard in the playoffs is something … I’ll never see again against Denver when they blew that 3-1 lead. You know, this was the big, bad Clippers who had been coming for the Lakers’ necks, who poked fun at LeBron for the glitz and the glamor of the Laker brand: street lights over spotlights, that whole mentality.

And guess what? When push came to shove, (the Clippers) didn’t get the job done. You know, the Nuggets were still on the come up. I don’t really look at them sideways at all for not advancing. The Lakers were just a better team in that series, but you know, the list could go on from there. LeBron led the way.

I’ll cap it with one last kind of visual memory. This was all over social media at the time, but certainly different to see this from four or five feet away outside the Lakers’ locker room after the championship. Obviously champagne (is) flowing. And I remember Kyle Kuzma was just going crazy just spraying champagne everywhere.

Big LBJ mood: He’s FaceTiming with his mother: “I hope I continue to make you proud, Ma. …I love you.” pic.twitter.com/ApEDBs6dHP

— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) October 12, 2020

But LeBron removes himself from the locker room and grabs his cell phone. And he calls his wife, Savannah, and he calls his mom, Gloria, and he ends up FaceTiming. And by the time I got to him, with reporters all around him, he’s laying on his back, cigar in his mouth, legs crossed, FaceTiming, he’s got the phone above him as he lays square on the ground and he’s talking to his mother and I’m paraphrasing here, but I wrote it at the time, he just said, mom this ain’t bad for, you know, a kid from Akron. You know, we came a long way. It was neat because he made it about them. It was “we did this, we did that.” And he really just was telling his mom thanks.

This wasn’t obviously his first championship, but you could tell how special it was for him to get one in L.A., get one within the adversity of the bubble, get one with his third franchise in his storied career.

He was a happy dude. and that was fun to watch. And they got the job done.

---

Related reading

Vardon: LeBron and a ‘Beautiful Day’ for Cleveland’s first title since 1964
No Dunks: LeBron James, King of the Memes
Weinbach Q&A: The Redeem Team and LeBron’s “unicorn” entertainment career
Vardon: Introduction to the “A King’s Reign” podcast series

(Photo of Anthony Davis and LeBron James: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)